Breaking Down the 10 Goals of the Affordable Care Act

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as ObamaCare, has been a highly controversial piece of legislation. With nearly 319 million Americans living in the U.S., a population so large will definitely have strong differences of opinion about the ACA and the health care mandate. But many Americans have lost sight of the original purpose of the law. The ACA has 10 specific sections to point to the goals it aims to fulfill.

One of the biggest goals of the ACA was to offer affordable, quality health insurance for all Americans. Many of the 10 major points of the ACA gave individual states control over how much or how little they wanted to expand public programs (such as Medicaid) to protect lower income Americans from high health care costs. Let’s take a deeper look at each of these 10 sections and what they mean for Americans and their health care.

Understanding the ACA as it was originally written and intended is a major part of understanding ObamaCare. Changes have been made and challenges have been brought, but knowing the original purpose of the law can help Americans understand the shifts we are seeing in health care today.